Don’t expect to see Kendall Jenner around honeycomb any time soon—the model and reality TV star has trypophobia, a condition that amounts to a fear of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps. She made the announcement on her blog on Monday, explaining that she has a “really bad” form of the phobia.

“Trypophobics are afraid of tiny little holes that are in weird patterns,” she explained. “Things that could set me off are pancakes, honeycomb, or lotus heads (the worst!). It sounds ridiculous but so many people actually have it! I can't even look at little holes—it gives me the worst anxiety. Who knows what's in there???”

Jenner isn’t alone. Trypophobia is known as “the common phobia you’ve never heard of,” Simon Rego, Psy.D., director of psychology training and the cognitive behavioral therapy training program at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, tells SELF.

Research on trypophobia is pretty new—the first study on the condition was published in 2013 in the journal Psychological Science. For the study, researchers randomly gathered about 300 men and women and showed them photos of things that could set trypophobics off, like lotus heads. Nearly one in five women and one in 10 men had an adverse reaction to the photos.

Other than that, “we really don’t know that much about trypophobia,” Rego says. Experts aren’t sure what specifically causes some people to develop it over others, he says, but the fact that it’s a phobia may mean there’s an evolutionary fear component to it. “If you take each phobia and trace it back to its core elements, there’s usually some danger to our survival,” says Rego. For example, people with a fear of heights are very aware that they could fall and hurt themselves. The same is true for a fear of spiders and flying—there is a chance you could get hurt, even if it's small.

There are certain plants or species of animals with bumps or holes on them that have venomous qualities, which can help explain trypophobia, anxiety disorders expert Karen Cassiday, Ph.D., tells SELF. Phobias also can have a genetic component, she says, so if someone else in your family suffers from anxiety (which is linked to phobias), it may be more likely that you’ll have a phobia than someone without a family history of it.

Luckily, trypophobia can be successfully treated. Licensed clinical psychologist Alicia H. Clark, Psy.D., tells SELF that phobias like this are often diminished through straightforward cognitive behavioral therapy, in which someone is repeatedly exposed to what freaks them out. “Treatment starts with identifying the anxiety pattern and providing strategies that stop the panic cycle,” she says. “From there, cognitive strategies are added that gradually diminish a person's fear.”

That can mean showing someone a photo of a lotus head from a distance and gradually working up to having it be in close proximity, and then putting them in front of the real thing, Rego says. The goal is to help the trypophobic see that no harm will come from being near an object with holes or bumps and getting comfortable enough around them that their phobia is eventually overridden.

If you find that you have trypophobia—or any other phobia—and it’s impacting your daily life, Cassiday says it’s important to get help from a mental health professional. “It’s one of the easiest things in mental health to treat," she says.